skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great questions, you asked them for me.

Are you in a startup or looking for paid work before you move if not? We need someone to do some C++ for us before we move over to SF next year (from Brisbane)
Question for the HN community: As a software engineer considering work in the US I am covered under the list of professions for H1B & TN visas and can probably find a job where a company will sponsor me. However, my girlfriend went to school for a BCom in marketing. If the 2 of us considered moving to the US for work, what would be the easiest way for her to get a visa? Would she be able to get a TN visa as a marketing / management consultant (she graduated only 2 years ago)? Any tips are much appreciated.
Sounds like the correct decision. I'm sure the mods noticed that the front was covered with Steve Jobs stories and would have taken action without your spam if they had a problem with it.
Node.js is old news.
Time to move on to GoLang. :)
Silicon valley for EU innovators
Show HN: Election Lie Graph
From the perspective of theoretical computer science, the interviewer was correct. I'll try to sketch out why.

------------------

1. In the initial probing for the upper bound, there is no point to grow faster than 2x each time

If we double the probe each time, we'll find the upper bound in O(log N) time. Then, we'll need O(log N) additional time to find the real answer. That makes the entire algorithm O(log N).

Suppose instead, in the initial probing we grow the bound faster, say by squaring each time. We'll find the upper bound faster, but we'll still need additional O(log N) time to find the real answer. So, we didn't really make the algorithm (asymptotically) faster - it is still O(log N).

(I glossed over some details in the explanation, but even if you work out the math exactly - which is not that hard to do - the conclusion holds.)

------------------

2. There is no point starting from a number greater than 1

There is no way to pick a "good" starting number - should it be 1,000? 1,000,000,000? 10^100? (10^100)^100? You might as well start from 1. That way, you guarantee that you'll find small numbers fast and large numbers still in an asymptotically optimal time.

------------------

As someone with fairly strong theoretical computer science backgound, I can see the intended meaning behind the interviewer's question and answer. But, it is a theoretical question. There definitely are a lot of highly valuable software developers out there who couldn't answer it.
I'm so jealous I was denied my TN last year because the interviewing agent didn't like my credentials, I'm a Mexican citizen and we don't have it that easy, we have to make an appointment for a paperwork review process (1 month minimum) then they schedule your for interview ( 1mknth here too ). At the time I was just married, my employer had just moved us to Chicago, and suddenly I was in Tijuana ( my hometown ) without a job or any personal belongings. Haven't applied again since I haven't had the luck of getting another employer try to hire me since they are all scared ( with justification )of the process, wish it was easier for us too, but I know we have a higher track of abusing the system (especially on immigration). Still. I would try again if opportunity came.

Edit: typo
If everybody tied these people up uselessly, then their business model would become untenable and they'd have to think of some other scam.
> Tesla does not need US handouts, subsidized loans and other craptrap. If the biz/product is a winner it will do fine.

If that's truly your belief, let's carry it out across the board to be fair and complete. No more subsidies, exemptions or bailouts for banks, Wall Street, oil companies, mining companies or religions (via income tax exemptions). Oh that's right. Those are approved and supported by the Republican party. So those are perfectly ok.

But if it is about say solar, wind, tidal, or geothermal energy, or about science, education, helping the unemployed, the sick, disabled, elderly, retired -- those are what we should be spending less on as taxpayers and just let nature take its course. Let the "market" decide the winners and losers. If they can hack it on their own, the market will reward them with enough cash. Otherwise they die. There is absolutely no other long term consideration we should be taking into account, no strategic concerns, no follow-on effects, no externalities (those don't exist in a proper capitalist/rightwing/libertarian mindset, it seems), and certainly no moral considerations to be had. And there is no such thing as climate, ecosystems, or species other than humanity or the ones we pet or put on our plates -- that's liberal hippy talk. Science? A thinly-veiled conspiracy against my Bible. Also there's no need for any business or startup to ever do any R&D spending up front that doesn't have an immediate return via product revenue. That's just insane and asking for trouble. Any new idea must be profitable and able to stand on its own legs in year one, on day one -- nay literally within moments of conceiving of it. Period. No exceptions for ramp-up time, for execution risks, experimentation, taste shifts, refinement, pivoting, serendipity, or market events beyond one's control. That's all weak-minded liberal talk.

$500M loan to one particular solar company that folds? Travesty. Trillions spent on unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started by the last Republican administration? Crickets chirping because apparently perfectly ok. Chance a few more blacks or elderly or college students might get to vote -- and not for the candidate I want? Tragedy. Billionaires now being able to spend effectively unlimited amounts of cash to flood media with dishonest ads backing their favored candidate? Perfectly ok. Because the market is always right. Government always eeeevil (eg. Social Security, teachers, firefighters, roads, libraries, schools, defense). Market always guuud (eg. Enron, Deepwater, Goldman Sachs, AIG).
Many Indian call center employees have been abused very badly by foreigners, so I am not surprised these scammers can find people to work for them.
One of the things that I loved about Toastmasters is that they designated someone to be the "um grammarian." Their job was to count how many times you used filler words or unnecessary pauses. Very frustrating at first, but damn it really made me a better speaker. Because of that brief experience it is kinda hard to listen to Obama talk sometimes, sometimes he has the MOST unnecessary ummm and ahhhs.
While you're at it shouldn't it be "stellar power" etc? Unless the aliens are supposed to be building a Dyson Sphere around the Sun which would be decidedly easier to observe.
Alan Turing's cyber-legacy praised by GCHQ chief
It should be possible in a single line of Python..

pip install fizzbuzz

And then:

import fizzbuzz
print fizzbuzz.fizzbuzz()

Or for the second solution:

print fizzbuzz.fizzbuzzbazz()
I wrote a post about this (Spanish only for now): http://taytus.com/2012/10/el-steve-que-extrano/
Most of them are (the same story) though.
I guess I don't understand why you think Facebook is scanning/visiting links, nor why I should care about that.
My friend's done the same thing over at http://idiari.es. Going over the posts there reminded me how vast his range was — from architecture to tech to HR, he had insights in almost every area.
A bug tracker is not a TODO list. I work on Hadoop, and there are bugs that have been open for 6 years now, and probably will be open for 6 more. Bug trackers can help you compose a TODO list (sometimes called a roadmap, in a corporate context), but they are not themselves TODO lists.
Err why is a non lethal, not particularly damaging drug going to be an unethical drug trial?
Yes I do, have to keep up with my friends. Sometimes I post pictures from the other accounts, but not very often, just enough to seem legit. Facebook has detected that one of the accounts may be false, and has warned me about it, thats why I began posting and sharing stuff so their bull-detecting-system wouldnt go off. It hasnt so far.
Assuming that "quality" is the sum of a large number of independent factors, I guess the central limit theorem applies.
Personally I'd be happy with fewer "look at this idiot" links, whether they be on Facebook or HN. If its more of a "something to think about" link, even if I disagree, I think I'm ok if their like count goes up when I share it.
Singaporean government employees make a lot of money (but are probably way better educated than US counterparts).
It's funny to see this as I (and I suspect probably many others) felt compelled to take a screenshot when this happened, because it was so bizarre to see the front page consist of a single story - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/140966/hn_jobs.png

I also did the same when Dennis Ritchie died, though not every story was about that - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/140966/hn_ritchie.png

RIP to both of them.
> Anyone remember the headlines several years ago when "Google 'scans' your emails to serve targetted ads'? When was the last time you heard someone complain about that anymore? No one does, because it doesn't matter.

Microsoft begs to differ, at least when trying to sell you Office 365: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbrX5U75dk
Ruby without Rails ;)
Entrepreneurs Starting Up With Fewer Employees
And this and VBA is why office is so irreplaceable. I wrote a report generation tool in 1999 with word 97. It picked a report definition off a file share, assembled documents from fragments on disk (up to 50 pages a pop with tables, graphs etc) and emailed them or printed them. 2000 documents an hour on a single Pentium pro 200 with 128mb of ram on NT. It took 2 days to write and was used until 2009 by 9000 users

This was just word, com and nothing else. Even the application host was an instance of word.

I doubt it could have been done with anything else then or now.
What is the easiest way to cut a pizza into 11 equal slices?
Why high-level World of Warcraft players make better employees than Harvard MBAs
Minefold (YC W12) launched 3 hours before Steve Jobs died and got, uh, 23 upvotes[1] before disappearing into oblivion.

[1] http://cl.ly/image/371P0B3j3g3H
Wow, has it really been a year?! It feels like it happened a few months ago, tops.
Most app developers make less than $500 a month (chart) — Tech News and Analysis
Hague gives cybercrime warning
Hack the Process
I originally majored in biochemistry, so this stuff is a nerdy enjoyment.

The levels of ketamine required to form Olney's Lesions are 40mg/kg (given olney.txt), whereas the typical dose to reach a k-hole (the highest recreational level) is 1mg/kg. http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_dose.shtml Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olneys_lesions#Controversy

In addition, the dosage levels of recreational ketamine are lower than the anesthetic dosages of ketamine. Repeated use of ketamine would probably still cause problems though, though the problems would be more along the lines of general drug dependency and not being able to think straight.

> Not really something you should want to self medicate with at this point until more research is done.

I dunno. Depression can be really dangerous & costly too-- both from suicide and just generally not being happy in life.
Man I just treat my blog like I used to treat my Livejournal: I write about whatever I want to write. Sometimes that's "woo check out this cool YouTube video". Sometimes that's "hey come see me dance". Sometimes it's a dream I had. Sometimes it's musings on comics I like, or on the ones I'm working on.

And every once in a great while I actually try to write up something about how I use the tools I've mastered. Then I get bored and go use them instead and post the cool new thing I've drawn.
This is a great post for validating management concerns about pulling in sexy new technologies for the hell of it.

At the end of the day, the Rails stuff got the job done. LinkedIn stayed up and was able to grow and add mobile features during that time. The current solution, the node.js stack, is even newer than Rails. So no, I don't think this validates management desires to stay with old technology.

It's also a great post illuminating how in hindsight some things can be really obvious (that building a high capacity web service dependent on a single-threaded server will give you problems down the road), but at the time it's not always easy seeing the woods for the trees.

Um, the new solution is single-threaded too. Threading and concurrency are not the same things.
About the GamePad API in Google Chrome
They avoid a normal conversation because then the interviewer would not be able to be achieve a master smug rating. You need to be psychic and 'get' what direction or type of response that they expect.
I go for a hybrid approach. A personal blog (or nowadays, Twitter) for sharing random Youtube videos, commenting on politics, and other stuff, and then a "professional" blog for writing longer articles on. It's nice knowing potential employers can see writings that are actually relevant to my field, and not "check out this Gangnam Style parody" ;)
Yes, we have interacted there a few times. I would probably use the term "common-mode cancellation." But it is something that is a very base concept in EE and the other terminology makes sense to me, although for non-EE I could see the issue.

You should make hacker news your website on EE? Your account looks some bare there, add some information!
My mom sometimes talks about how she felt when John Lennon died, and I always sort of scoffed at the notion of being overwhelmed by the death of a celebrity stranger.

I understood what she meant when Steve Jobs died - I was really overwhelmed, I think because I derived such a big part of my life, livelihood, and identity from iOS over the last 3-4 years.
It is a terrible way of discovering it.

It's the same as if they asked you a php question. You answer it, and then they say 'wrong!!!! the right answer is php sucks, in ruby I do it like so:...'
looks like it's down now, images weren't loading properly.

Basically a longer nano.
What do you expect, he wrote the book on it.
It's very hard to do Test Driven Development in Go because there is no mocking library that can help with stubbing constructor or static method.

Well, you'll be happy to learn that Go doesn't have constructors or static methods, then. :)

What Go does have is a standard unit testing framework which is quite nice: http://golang.org/pkg/testing/

"Mocks" in general are a cumbersome and somewhat lame attempt to deal with the many limitations of inheritance-based designs in languages such as Java. In Go, there's no need to create a Mock, because you can easily create a wrapper object for whatever object you want to test using Go's anonymous member syntax. Then you simply override whatever methods you want to on the wrapper object, and let the others get passed through.
> The company has lost over $850 million since being founded in 2003.

Lost? Literally? Since it's been lost I'd love to be the guy that finds those money bags laying around somewhere. But seriously, I'd suggest rather it's been spent, and probably spent mostly on R&D, which is precisely what any reasonable observer would expect an innovative new electric car company to be doing. Musk said even today I believe that within a month they appear to be headed to cash-flow positive. That's a huge good milestone for a new company to achieve, even more so in a bleeding edge one as theirs. And they've already built, sold and shipped 2 models of new product already, in customer hands. That significantly de-risks them. Completely de-risks? Of course not. But if you look at accomplishments to date, their momentum, and the degree of talent on board, I think the smart bet to make on them is up/long.
Really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/opinion/jerry-seinfeld-rea...
There are many assumptions in the article and in your comment.
We have two data we will for now assume are facts:
1. depressed people feel better after taking ketamine
2. katamine taking is correlated with synapse generation

You manage to infer, as well as the author of the OP, that depression decreases the number of synapses or eventually induce a sort fatigue in synapses because of stress. That depression is not only correlated but also induced by synapse depletion, that increasing the number of synapse is what makes depressed people feel better, that depression (the symptom) has one cause, here stress inducing synapse fatigue or depletion, etc.

It takes just common sense thinking to understand that most of this reasoning is just crap. Suggesting to put that in a machine learning language is is even more depressing.
Website photography London
In one sense Jeff is right, I have no problem remembering what I want to do today. My problem is that I need to do things that other people want me to do. Unfortunately my ability to remember is strongly weighted by my give-a-shit level. Hence a list.
Ask HN: YC s12 Python Hacker seeking co-founder
I've decided, after long thought, to leave my YC s12 team. I am not sure about applying to the winter batch, or building something in anticipation of raising funding later on (through YC or otherwise).

PG's #2 crazy idea (replace email) is the one that's really on my mind all the time. I've got lots of ideas, so I'm looking for a fellow python or full stack hacker.

My background is a PhD dropout in BioEngineering from Duke, focusing on EEG signal processing and brain/machine interface. I'm a self-taught programmer, python/java/html/css/javascript/ and a bit of C. I'm picking up lisp right now for fun.

I'm obviously well-networked within YC and especially our s12 batch, and also have about 6-12 months runway and renting a large mansion in los altos hills. I profit $2-3k a month by renting out on airbnb, so we'd be set for a while. One room is setup as a sick startup office, with thunderbolt monitors, cyborg mounts, whiteboards etc. Obviously my co-founder could stay for free at the house, so you'd have few expenses.

If this sounds like a good deal for some one, hit me up!

arjun.vasan@gmail.com
Test your Web Server by Breaking it With Traffic
The #Geonpi Movement - A victory for French Entrepreneurs
Ketamine & autism

"Drug Reverses Abnormal Brain Function in Rett Syndrome Mice"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121003132418.ht...

"ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2012) — A promising study out October 3 in the Journal of Neuroscience showed that in a mouse model of Rett syndrome, researchers were able to reverse abnormalities in brain activity and improve neurological function by treating the animals with an FDA-approved anesthesia drug, ketamine. Rett syndrome is among the most severe autism-related disorders, affecting about one in 10,000 female births per year, with no effective treatments available."
What were the benefits you saw in switching from .NET to Node? Was it in basic code structure/complexity or performance?

I'd actually be very surprised if NodeJS running on Heroku (which is built on EC2) performs better than compiled .NET code running on dedicated Windows hardware.
You can always proxy it through your own server, although obviously that's less than ideal.
Haha, I remember this. Worst launch day ever.
No, you can't call your competing product the exact same thing they call theirs.

Likewise, it is reasonable that Microsoft can't call their competing license "open source" when that term already has an established commercial definition and trademark with a specific set of consumer expectations.

Further, until a tradmeark is filed or established by extensive use, competing products can use similar words in their titles. Once upon a time you could have had Microsoft Windows, OpenWindows, the comp.windows.x newsgroup (suggesting that X is a subset of the generic category of "Windows"), etc. Now they will sue if your OS name even rhymes with Windows.
I think Mozilla used something similar in Firefox:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XPCOM

Other than that I don't know any other companies who did something like COM.
He was some kind of a man.
Greater beings are nothing to worry about. They remain undetectable in order to preserve the lesser beings as long as possible.
great idea. somebody make that happen (via index fund or whatever financial instrument is equivalent)

and then shutup and take my money. :)
Minecraft API proposals
Google didn't implement in some scripting language to get to the market a few months early.

That's actually exactly what they did.
I'd rather call it a list of principles. Reminds me of (unfortunaltely out of print):

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Software-Development-Alan-D...
What would they gain if they moved from node to nginx and a c++ with asio backend (e.g. http://cgi.sourceforge.net/) ?
Louis Vuitton Sunglasses Online Sale
Trusting Amazon (no longer)
That's item 1 on his list isn't it?
I felt nothing.
Kevin, thanks for mentioning the Firefox crash. I opened a bug report to track the issue: https://bugzil.la/798244

I bisected the recent Nightly builds and I believe this crash was a regression in Nightly 18.0a1 (2012-09-29). I was not, however, able to reproduce this crash on Aurora 17.0a2 builds. What OS are you running? (I'm running Mac OS X 10.8.)
Some social critics say psychology/psychiatry's rise is in part because it let other people and institutions do victim blaming, and not invest in treating societal problems.

It also fits well with neo-liberal thought:"little concern for externalities", "rational consumer" and this kind of bullshit.
> Err why is a non lethal, not particularly damaging drug going to be an unethical drug trial?

Antidepression drugs, indeed all psychoactive drugs, are always a potential ethics issue. Consider the brouhaha that erupted when it was discovered that some antidepression drugs caused people to commit suicide or have suicidal thoughts:

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=31...

A quote: "The FDA has warned that children and adults taking antidepressants can become suicidal in the first weeks of therapy and that physicians should watch patients closely when first giving the drugs or changing dosages. The FDA is asking drug manufacturers to place explicit warnings about the drugs' side effects, including the risk of suicide, on their labels."

Any human-administered drug is a potential ethical issue, from vitamins upward. Imagine a study in which an experimental group is given a daily vitamin, and a control group is given a placebo but told they're receiving a vitamin. Several years go by and the relative health of the study participants is closely monitored.

Can you not see the ethical issue here? Can you not imagine the lawsuits that would result from the parents of those in the control group who perhaps didn't thrive as expected, or for some completely imaginary consequence having nothing to do with the vitamin study, but sufficient to sue for civil damages?

And finally, depression drugs are hardly "non lethal, not particularly damaging". They are a source of great controversy and have been the focus of a number of conflicts over the years.
Welcome to the wonderful world of publicly funded science publication!
I have just tested it on a Windows Vista machine, it doesn't work in Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. Putting each side of the equation into an alert box shows the difference.
Google doodle for Alan Turing's 100th birthday
Psychohistory involves predicting the effects of large numbers of people and assumed that single individuals could not significantly change the future of the galaxy.

Without giving too much away, The Mule was a unique being who could not have been predicted, who could significantly change the future of a whole galaxy.

The Seldon Plan did have contingencies for this kind of thing, hence the Second Foundation novel.